From the first shot of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, as dogs howl on a frozen tundra in Nunavut before we’re launched into an Inuktitut-language story, I knew that I was watching something unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
Based on Inuit oral tradition, the film is about two brothers — one named Amaqjuaq (The Strong One) and the other Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) — and is an epic tale about betrayal, love, and trouble within a tight-knit community. Despite being a work of fiction — this was a retelling of a story passed down through generations for over 500 years — it felt real and authentic. It was unapologetically Inuit, from the cast and setting to the language and storytelling, and it wasn’t going to pander to non-Inuit audiences with overwrought explanations or dialogue.
That’s what made it such an innovative and inimitable film. It gave other Indigenous groups permission to tell their own stories their own way, in their own language, about their own culture — an influence that has been felt in Indigenous film ever since.
Even though there’s nudity (in a famous scene that will stay with you, where Atanarjuat runs naked across the tundra), crude songs, fights, and violence, it never feels exploitative. This can be credited to the efforts made by Kunuk and the Isuma Productions team to stay true to the original story, consulting eight Igloolik elders to hear their versions of the legendary tale and bringing those insights into the script.
They shot the film over six months, entirely on HD video — rare at the time, but also for practical reasons because of the cold temperatures — and from the afternoon to the middle of the night, since there was always sun to work with in Nunavut. The film also changes the ending of the legend: in The Fast Runner: Filming the Legend of Atanarjuat, author Michael Robert Evans writes about how we see a gentler banishment of the troublemakers instead of a revenge killing, in a change attributed to writer Paul Apak Angilirq’s desire to end the film with hope.
Atanarjuat received accolades across the globe, including winning the coveted Caméra d’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. That also translated to ticket sales, with the film becoming one of the highest-grossing Canadian releases of that year. “Our objective was not to impose southern filmmaking conventions on our unique story,” Isuma Productions has said, “but to let the story shape the filmmaking process in an Inuit way.”
An Inuit oral story, told entirely in Inuktitut with an Inuit cast, transfixed audiences everywhere. The bar had been raised for the entire industry.
Kelly Boutsalis is a writer and Associate International Programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Screening: Monday, July 31st, 2023 at 7:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Memory is a cursed thing. We tell ourselves stories to live, based on the roles we are assigned at birth. Sarah Polley’s 2012 documentary Stories We Tell asks why. Do our memories protect us, or exist only to reinforce the secrets, lies, and power structures inherent in any family? Why do we lie to the ones we love the most — and why do we let ourselves believe it?
After Away from Her and Take This Waltz, Sarah Polley — already Oscar-nominated for writing the former — turned the camera on herself to investigate a nagging family rumour. It was already a crass joke amongst her siblings, the kind of lore that might fuel a soap opera or an episode of Maury: that her father wasn’t really her father at all. Polley casts her dad, Michael, once an English stage actor, as the narrator. She sets him up in a recording booth, filming him as he ends up telling the most pivotal story of her life.
As a documentarian, Polley is a committed investigative reporter. In a series of interviews, she gently presses her father, family friends, and siblings Susy, John, Mark, and Joanna to give her the facts. Like the scraps of fabric that eventually make a quilt, these testimonials form a patchwork portrait of the brilliant, complicated woman at the heart of the film: Polley’s mother, Diane, who lost custody of the children from her previous marriage after an affair, only to die of cancer days after Sarah’s 11th birthday.
Diane is vivacious; Diane is life itself. Glorious home movies, shot on Super 8, see her lighting up a room, dancing with a cigarette and a drink. She escapes to Montreal to act in a play where she falls in love with her castmate, chasing her snow-suited children mid-rehearsal. Trapped between all the roles she can’t play, Diane’s contradictions are part of her allure. Then, the documentary bends around again, burning everything down.
In Stories We Tell, every convention of “objective” documentary filmmaking gets disrupted in favour of something closer to the truth. One sibling discounts the other, telling a completely different version of what happened. In a brilliant device I’d never seen employed in a film before, we learn that the heartbreaking Super 8 home videos of Polley’s family are completely false — they’ve actually been shot by Polley just for this film, with actors who resemble the real-life storytellers.
Looking back at Stories We Tell in a 2019 interview with IndieWire, Polley said it was the film she felt proudest of. “I feel like I wasn’t trying to make it like anything I’d seen before — I was sort of trying to let it invent itself.”
Made with modest means and uncompromising bravery, Polley’s documentary achieves what’s impossible to do in almost any family — it tells the truth.
Chandler Levack is a writer and filmmaker. Her first feature film, I Like Movies, premiered in 2022.
Screening: Monday, July 17th, 2023 at 8:30pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the level of difficulty it took to turn The Sweet Hereafter into a critical and commercial success. The story’s stock-in-trade is pain — most of the characters are grieving parents — and the audience’s closest thing to a proxy is an opportunistic lawyer looking to weaponize the parents’ sorrow.
In less competent hands, such a narrative would be taxing if not unbearable. But writer/director Atom Egoyan steers clear from exploitation and chooses to humanize both the innocent and the guilty. More impressively, he uses seven fractured timelines to tell the story, placing the focus on the characters’ arcs, not the chronology of events. Having to keep track of every thread forces you to pay attention.
Based on a book by Russell Banks, Egoyan moves the setting of The Sweet Hereafter from Upstate New York to northern British Columbia. Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), the aforementioned slippery lawyer, travels to a mountain town to put together a class-action lawsuit against those deemed responsible for the deaths of 14 children — passengers of a school bus that plunged into a frozen lake. Through Stephens, we meet the parents of the victims (Bruce Greenwood, Maury Chaykin, and Alberta Watson among them), the bus driver (Gabrielle Rose), and Nicole (Sarah Polley), one of the survivors who’s seen as a potential star witness.
The compelling plot (which hit me harder once I became a parent) levels up on the strength of the characters, particularly Stephens — whose charming demeanor dissolves whenever his own daughter enters the picture — and Nicole, slowly coming to the realization that she may be the victim of abuse. Both storylines could sustain a movie of their own, but in the context of The Sweet Hereafter, they frame a tragic tapestry. Mychael Danna’s elegiac score gives the story mythic undertones.
One of the reasons the film lands the way it does has to do with Egoyan being a filmmaker in flux. Before The Sweet Hereafter, he was uncompromising (see Exotica or The Adjuster). After, he started making movies more accessible to the general public (Chloe and Remember are straight-up crowd-pleasers). The Sweet Hereafter marks the sweet spot in which both currents converge, one fuelling the other: the complex storytelling — Egoyan’s trademark — hides relatable, powerful emotions, not quite the case before. The director plays us like a fiddle: we’re alternately saddened, horrified, and slightly hopeful at a moment’s notice.
A common mistake is thinking that this is a movie about community. Sure, the concept is paid lip service by many of the characters, but at the end of the day, greed is the strongest motivator, followed by retribution. In the ethos of The Sweet Hereafter, community is an illusion. The characters — and, by extension, us — are irrevocably alone.
Jorge Ignacio Castillo is a writer and film critic. He currently serves as chair of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle.
Screening: Monday, July 24th, 2023 at 8:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
With his Oscar-nominated 2010 film Incendies — a haunting, cross-generational tale about confronting dark secrets from the past in order to break cycles of trauma — Denis Villeneuve firmly established himself as one of the great filmmakers of his generation.
A reworking of Wajdi Mouawad’s celebrated play, the director toiled on his script for half a decade, keeping the original story structure while replacing all dialogue. The end result is an emotionally rich, morally ambiguous masterwork that draws from ancient myths while presenting a narrative that continues to shock audiences with its emotional rawness and startling third-act revelations.
The opening shot, soundtracked by Radiohead and with framing inspired by war photography, provides an intense introduction. We see a strong-willed child — with three dots tattooed on the back of his right foot — having his hair shorn; as he stares defiantly and directly at the viewer, we are practically dared to know more about his origin.
We then meet twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette), who have been summoned to the office of notary Jean Lebel (Rémy Girard). Lebel reads to the children the will of their late mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), and it’s in this dull, grey office that they learn of a final request for them to deliver two letters — one to a brother they previously knew nothing of, one to a father long thought dead.
Thus begins a journey that takes places in multiple liminal spaces, from disparate geographical locations to sectarian religious divides. This is a tale mixing past and present, where the deeper that one explores, the more uncertainties are then revealed. The use of flashbacks is both unsettling and informative, as Villeneuve weaves a multi-temporal tapestry that mirrors how shattering the series of revelations about Nawal’s past truly are. A harrowing sequence on a bus is as searing as anything you’ll see in most horror films — yet some of the film’s most chilling moments occur in near silence as the full weight of the past comes to bear.
Working with cinematographer André Turpin, the majority of the film is captured using natural lighting, giving Incendies a documentary-like feel. The murky, dreary, concrete jungle of a mid-winter Montreal — with half-melted snow revealing the detritus of the city — matches, in subtle ways, the similarly monochromatic, rubble-strewn landscapes shot in Jordan, which stands in for the unnamed, fictionalized Middle Eastern country of Nawal’s birth. It’s a visually profound way of comparing motherland and home; travelling to the other side of the world is not sufficient to fully escape from the horrors of the past.
Given the film’s focus on how the past informs the present, Incendies provides a unique lens through which to view the director’s own creative journey. One can find desiccated elements mined for blockbusters like Dune or Blade Runner 2049, the family secrets in Arrival, the moral quagmire illustrated in Sicario, or the dark psychology of Enemy, as well as the ambiguities seen in earlier films like Maelström and Polytechnique. These are all exceptional works — but it was with the pyrotechnical Incendies that Villeneuve’s fire first burned this brightly.
Jason Gorber is a writer and film critic. He is the editor-in-chief and chief critic of That Shelf.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
In a career spanning more than 50 years and as many films, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance stands as Alanis Obomsawin’s magnum opus.
Winner of 18 different prizes at film festivals around the world — including becoming the first documentary to win Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival — it’s among the most important documentaries ever made here. While Obomsawin was already a well-known filmmaker when Kanehsatake was released, this is the film that made her a legend.
A behind-the-pines view of one of the most infamous confrontations between the Canadian state and First Nations people, the film chronicles the dispute over traditional Kanien’kéhaka territory in Quebec during the summer of 1990 (also known as the Oka Crisis). The land was designated to be turned into a golf course, culminating in its occupation by community members and armed warriors. As tensions and temperatures mounted, the provincial Quebec police gave way to the Canadian Army, cutting off those inside and preventing the media from seeing what was happening.
Obomsawin spent 78 days behind the lines, often alone, recording the events. She faced verbal abuse from the soldiers and has described her time there as “hell on Earth.” She remembers crying as the warriors made out their last wills and testaments, sure they would be killed by the army.
For very different reasons, both the army and the National Film Board wished she would leave. But she stayed steadfast, determined to preserve her work and bear witness. She crafted the material she gathered there into four films (the others being Rocks at Whiskey Trench, Spudwrench: Kahnawake Man, and My Name is Kahentiiosta), telling different aspects of the story while providing viewers with the context for how Canada arrived at this horrific moment.
Upon release, Kanehsatake and Obomsawin faced fierce criticism in Quebec. Premiering internationally at first, the CBC initially balked at showing the film, instead asking for its own access to Obomsawin’s footage. The NFB and Obomsawin declined, and the film was ultimately shown on CBC after its historic win at TIFF.
“It’s changed the way people have thought about us,” Obomsawin tells me when asked to reflect on the legacy of the film. This is certainly true. Our understanding of the events of that summer in 1990 have been forever shaped by Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance, which has prevented the state’s narrative from being the only one heard. Rather than Indigenous radicals out to prevent approved development, the film’s historical details show a dispute stretching back generations — one deeply embedded in Canada’s ongoing colonialism, and of land defended by not just armed warriors, but elders, women, and children as well.
Among its many lasting contributions, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance is a totem to the determination and will of Indigenous people to defend our lands. “You should stand for the land,” Obomsawin says. This film is her way of doing just that.
Jesse Wente is an Ojibwe journalist and broadcaster. He is the director of the Indigenous Screen Office and chairperson of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Screening: Sunday, July 9th, 2023 at 7:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
When David Cronenberg’s film about a group of middle-aged Torontonians who are aroused by car crashes debuted at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, audiences jeered and stormed out of the theatre. Outrage over the aptly-titled Crash spread like wildfire throughout the industry, drawing the ire of Ted Turner and Francis Ford Coppola, who, according to Cronenberg, refused to personally present him with the Special Jury Prize at the festival.
Across the pond, Crash set in motion a debate on censorship; it has often been referenced in academic papers on the subject since. British news outlets The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard infamously launched a highly orchestrated campaign to ensure that Crash would not be seen by British audiences (though, after a lengthy review by the British Board of Film Classification, the film was found to be neither dangerous nor harmful). Suffice to say, the hysterics around Crash eclipsed the movie even before its release.
It’s rather ironic, then, that for all that controversy, when considering the muted thriller for its two most-discussed elements — sex and car crashes — neither are actually particularly remarkable. The sex scenes are enticing, no doubt, but nothing salacious; the same can be said for the violence. It’s when the two parts are considered as a whole that an unsettling discomfort is found.
A meditation on emptiness and technology’s emerging ability to fill that void, Crash takes this common Cronenbergian theme to an extreme. When James Ballard (played by James Spader) feels a crackling of titillation after being in a near-fatal collision, he finds not only the spark that has been missing in his life but a community of like-minded people who have made the same discovery. Social commentary woven together with commanding storytelling has always been Cronenberg’s hallmark, and Crash is the perfect coalescence of what makes the filmmaker one of our country’s finest artists.
Looking back on the outrage Crash caused at Cannes must be akin to how Elvis Presley’s scandalous gyrations on The Milton Berle Show in 1956 seemed to audiences in the ’70s — rather subdued and even innocuous in comparison to the acts of the day. Thankfully, in the nearly 30 years since the film’s release, the initial frenzied reception has tampered and is now relegated to its trivia page, leaving the genius and beauty of Crash to shine unencumbered.
Rachel Ho is the film editor at Exclaim! Magazine and co-founder of The Asian Cut.
Screening: Saturday, July 22nd, 2023 at 9:30pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Part of a Cronenberg double feature. Find out more »
If you’ve never seen Dead Ringers, you might only know it as that creepy ’80s drama where Jeremy Irons plays twin gynecologists who spiral into drug addiction and depravity when their codependent dynamic is threatened by a woman strong enough to call them out on their collective bullshit. And if you have seen David Cronenberg’s 1988 masterwork, you know that everything in the previous sentence is indeed accurate — and also that it’s one of the saddest, most astute studies of despair ever captured on film.
Every time I revisit Dead Ringers, which I first saw on its opening day in Toronto’s cavernous and long-gone Uptown 1, I’m struck less by its disturbing qualities and more by how terribly sorrowful it is. From the first notes of Howard Shore’s mordant score to cinematographer Peter Suschitzky’s heartbreaking final tableau, this is a movie steeped in tragedy and inevitability.
Dead Ringers is the story of Beverly and Elliot Mantle, identical twin brothers who’ve grown up convinced that no one else will ever understand them. And they’ve spent their lives making sure of it, amplifying their mutual weirdness to the point that they’re comfortable standing in for one another in the exam room — which, given their chosen field, serves as a betrayal of the intimate trust they’ve built with their patients.
One of those patients is Claire Niveau, played by the formidable Geneviève Bujold. Niveau is an actor in Toronto shooting some generic thriller (a throwaway gag about the city’s growing reputation for hosting American productions like Cronenberg’s own The Fly). She comes to the Mantle Clinic for a checkup and falls for Beverly’s tenderness and compassionate nature — but, once she realizes Elliot is part of the package, refuses to play along with any of it. This introduces an irreparable fault between the brothers, which Cronenberg and Irons play out in meticulous detail and without ever tipping over into the fantastical. Yes, there’s a subplot that finds a drug-addled Beverly designing “gynecological instruments for working on mutant women.” But it’s not a genre element — it’s a sign that this damaged but essentially decent man has come unmoored, now a danger to both the women in his care and to himself.
The tragic aspects of Dead Ringers shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s development as a filmmaker — few of his heroes live to see the end credits, and some of them aren’t even heroes in the first place. But the specificity of the Mantle brothers’ tragedy, and the tenderness with which it’s told, marks the moment where Cronenberg comes into his own as a filmmaker.
Both Irons and Cronenberg have become legends in their respective pursuits. Irons would go on to win an Oscar for playing Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune — he made a point of thanking Cronenberg in his acceptance speech — while Cronenberg would go on to make more great films in and out of the genre realm (Naked Lunch, Crash, Spider, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, Crimes of the Future). But I’d argue that Dead Ringers remains their greatest work: two bodies, two minds, one masterpiece.
Norm Wilner is a writer and Acting Lead Programmer for Canada and Industry Selects at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Screening: Saturday, July 22nd, 2023 at 7:00PM — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Part of a Cronenberg double feature. Find out more »
Something C.R.A.Z.Y. happened at the movies in Quebec in the summer of 2005.
While the rest of the continent was busy watching aliens, superheroes, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Quebec filmgoers decided to acheter local in an unprecedented manner. And it was with a film that, on paper, reads like the antithesis of a blockbuster: a family drama about a young gay man coming of age in a big, strict Catholic family during the Quiet Revolution of 1960s and 70s Quebec.
But that’s how irresistible the late, great Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. is as a work of cinema. Not even Batman Begins — which C.R.A.Z.Y. outgrossed significantly in Quebec — stood a chance.
Deeply moving as much as it is wildly entertaining, the film charts the evolution of both this one family and the culture of an entire province as its queer protagonist, Zac (Marc-André Grondin), tries to figure out how he fits into both. Its title is derived from the names of Zac and his four brothers: Christian, Raymond, Antoine, and Yvan. But it’s also a reference to the abiding love their father (played by legendary Quebecois actor Michel Côté, who we sadly lost earlier this year) has for the Patsy Cline song of the same name — just one of the many songs that help make up the film’s staggering, era-specific soundtrack. (It took the producers two and half years and nearly 10% of the film’s entire budget to secure all the music rights; Vallée even gave up his salary to help pay for it.)
C.R.A.Z.Y. was nominated for 45 major awards around the world, 38 of which it won. It remains one of the highest-grossing films ever made in Quebec, and was a hit everywhere from Italy to Brazil to Singapore. And, oddly enough, it also made its director one of the most sought-after talents in the one place it struggled to be released (due to royalty disputes over the Pink Floyd song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”): the United States.
Vallée would go on to direct essentially everyone in Hollywood to major awards recognition, from Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club to Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern in Big Little Lies. He left us far too soon in 2022 — but, in the wake of his death, American audiences were belatedly gifted with one of Canada’s modern movie miracles when C.R.A.Z.Y. was finally released in U.S. cinemas.
As the golden age of summer blockbusters fades further into the rearview, it’s nice to be reminded that once upon a time in the province of Quebec, this little movie that could was just too good to be ignored by the zeitgeist.
Peter Knegt is a writer and filmmaker. His work at CBC Arts includes writing the column Queeries and hosting the series Here & Queer.
Screening: Sunday, July 30th, 2023 at 7:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Great works of cinema have an uncanny ability to transport the audience to a specific place and time, while prompting them to imagine the possibilities of the world just outside the theatre doors. Norman Jewison understood this better than most directors when he made In the Heat of the Night.
Based on John Ball’s novel about two cops investigating a murder in Mississippi, Jewison used the unlikely partnership of Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), a Black homicide detective from Philadelphia, and Bill Gillespie (Rod Steiger), a racist Southern police chief, to get viewers thinking about the changing climate in America.
Released in 1967 during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, it was one of the first studio films to directly address the flames of racial tension that were engulfing America. And while Jewison’s film wraps itself in a ribbon of hope, as both officers reach a mutual understanding by the end, the viewer is keenly aware along the journey that it could unravel at any moment.
It is this delicate mix of unease and optimism that makes In the Heat of the Night such a compelling work. Jewison captures the frustrations that often come with being a Black person in a predominantly white space. In one of the film’s most powerful moments, plantation owner Eric Endicott strikes Tibbs for daring to interrogate him about the murder — and Tibbs immediately slaps him right back. Besides being the first time a Black character had ever struck a white person in a major film, the scene allows Tibbs to assert his sense of agency in a town where everyone seems eager to strip away his humanity.
What I love most about this multi-Oscar-winning film is the way it works as both a character study and an engaging crime drama. Free from the confines of filming on a Hollywood lot — the studio did not think a movie with a Black lead was worth spending that type of money on — they shot the film in Illinois, as Poitier refused to film in the South due to safety concerns, which gave Jewison more creative freedom. Whether incorporating handheld cameras to make a chase scene more visceral, using zoom lenses to accentuate the tension, or playing up the wealth of humour in the script, it remains an endlessly fascinating watch.
In the Heat of the Night shows us just how many racial barriers can lie on the path toward mutual respect — and that makes it a timeless work that still reverberates 56 years later.
Courtney Small is a writer and film critic. He co-hosts the long-running radio show Frameline.
Screening: Sunday, July 16th, 2023 at 4:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
There’s an underrated scene early in Titanic, James Cameron’s 1997 disaster-romance, where Rose (Gloria Stuart) — a fictional survivor of the real-life ship’s sinking 84 years prior — watches in awe as it’s rendered as a sped-up animation.
Complete with profanity and sound effects, a researcher of RMS Titanic’s wreck (Lewis Abernathy) unfeelingly — almost excitedly — narrates how an iceberg punctured holes in the ship’s starboard, how freezing water flooded its bow until snapping it in half, and how the two parts then plummeted to the ocean floor.
“Pretty cool, huh?” he asks, capping off his sportscast of the worst night of this woman’s life.
The exchange clarifies, as much for us as for 100-year-old Rose, what actually happened the night of April 14, 1912 in terms of basic physics. But it also operates on a second level. We’ve been watching as this research crew jokes around and plunders the wreck in pursuit of their ultimate “payday”: an 18th-century diamond they believe went down with the ship. Rose is here to shine any light whatsoever on whether that’s true.
What she does instead is tell her passenger story in full, humanizing the more than 2000 souls on board at the time of the sinking, most of whom did not survive — the glaring omission in what she sarcastically calls the crew’s “fine, forensic analysis.”
Titanic might be read as an extended self-drag. The Kapuskasing-born Cameron first pursued a film about the ship because he wanted to explore the wreck himself and, quite simply, have someone else pay for it. But upon making the dive, he was overcome by the human element that had gotten lost somewhere in his science geekdom.
“I’d been studying it for months,” he’s recalled, “but … now it wasn’t at a remove … These were real people.” His three-hour epic — which he wrote, produced, directed, and co-edited — would weave these two threads, using a pair of imagined star-crossed lovers to hammer home a totally factual tragedy of human error and maritime climate.
The high-society melodrama of Titanic’s first half — Cassette One of the worn-out VHS two-parter still sitting in my parents’ basement — revolves around 17-year-old Rose (Kate Winslet), the suicidal fiancée of an evil Pittsburgh steel tycoon (Billy Zane). She’s saved “in every way that a person can be saved” by the freewheeling Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a third-class passenger with whom she’s resolved to disembark in New York City. But the couple meets their fate in Cassette Two, Cameron’s harrowing and extraordinary aqua-spectacle, for which he required millions of gallons of water and, famously, millions of unbudgeted studio dollars.
Though there was plenty of concern — to say nothing of the simmering media schadenfreude — that those dollars had been spent in vain, the film’s impact would quickly go far beyond ROI (though it was indeed the highest-grossing film of all time until Cameron’s own Avatar). The instant classic also made overnight superstars of its two leads, gave Céline Dion her spine-tingling signature song, and took home the coveted Best Picture among its 11 Oscar wins.
As for Cameron himself — a just-okay screenwriter but the kind of unparalleled showman that made you forget to care — he’d be allowed to do virtually anything he wanted from then on (including make the film again on another planet). Titanic, like his work since, was a staggering cultural moment whose greatness you had to respect no matter how you felt about its goodness.
Sydney Urbanek is a culture writer and editor. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.
The Terminator sequel doesn’t just retread the original with a bigger arsenal. Director James Cameron points a grenade launcher at the 1984 classic and blows everything up, repositioning his heroes and villains and toying with audience expectations in ways that are intentional and more than a little sentimental. Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, the original’s survivor destined to protect the future, is so disillusioned with humanity that she becomes her own worst enemy. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator goes from a soulless mass killer to a machine that could be taught to protect life. And, in a potent gesture for a movie released the same year Los Angeles police brutally assaulted Rodney King, the new futuristic killer out to destroy humanity is wearing a badge.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
After a screening of his 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World in Paris, someone asked Guy Maddin what his hometown of Winnipeg is like. His rambling 15-minute response spawned the outline for My Winnipeg, an intimate masterpiece where Maddin plumbs his own origin story in a fever dream blending fact and fiction. Darcy Fehr plays the director himself opposite Ann Savage (an OG femme fatale from 1945’s Detour) as his mother. They dramatize the filmmaker’s eagerness to escape an oppressive home, in a film that Frankensteins together trauma and perversions — both sexual and ahistorical — with lingering affection for Canada’s longitudinal centre. As usual, Maddin’s visual vocabulary is silent films and bad tropes, which, like Winnipeg, he embalms in a loving and hilarious way.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
David Cronenberg’s monumental satire on new media (and the new flesh) stars James Woods as a TV executive peddling porn and violence who starts to be physically and mentally attacked by a corrupting broadcast signal. In some ways, Videodrome is a brilliant response to the antagonistic relationship between Cronenberg and Ontario’s puritanical film censors who’d eagerly cut out so much of the sex and body horror in his movies. In Videodrome, which invited the same antagonism from censors, Cronenberg winks at the bureaucratic paranoia by blurring the line between onscreen and real violence, merging them together the same way he does technology and human anatomy. His embrace of the new flesh was both disturbingly cathartic and prophetic.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Norman Jewison gave us a rom-com where the grand gestures, wild emotional swings, and passionate professions of love don’t feel like they’re meeting genre expectations — they just feel Italian.
Moonstruck is a warm, carb-y, drunk-off-red-wine Brooklyn romance about a middle-aged woman (Cher) falling for her fiancé’s pizza-making rapscallion of a brother (Nicolas Cage). Jewison, who is not Italian, celebrates the community that gave us such heightened art forms as opera and commedia dell’arte. Who better to toast to such undying passions than Cher and Cage, two radiant actors who refuse to do anything small.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Canada has its own Zero Dark Thirty in Michel Brault’s Les ordres, a riveting and pioneering docudrama about the iron-fisted government response to the 1970 October Crisis. Brault won the directing prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival (a tie with Costa Gavras) for recreating the degradation endured by those summarily rounded up and imprisoned without charge for days, if not weeks, after Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act. Brault is celebrated for his painterly cinematography (Mon oncle Antoine) and developing Direct Cinema (Pour la suite du monde); that’s all evident in Les ordres, where he takes both styles further, mixing documentary with fiction to capture a complicated and troubling subject in simple and striking terms.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Dan Aykroyd originally pitched a scarier, futuristic Ghostbusters movie written with Eddie Murphy and John Belushi in mind for the leads. It was director Ivan Reitman who turned things around with writer Harold Ramis, making it a contemporary comedy instead — a family-friendly movie with ghosts like Slimer and Marshmallow Man that an entire generation of kids would hold close to their hearts. As for the adults, Reitman made sure Ghostbusters was horny as hell. The movie had about as many naughty sex jokes — randy demons, phallic ghost streams, Bill Murray’s innuendos — as his previous work producing Animal House and directing Meatballs.
Screening: Saturday, July 15th, 2023 at 6:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Mary Harron’s take on American Psycho rankled the novel’s author, Bret Easton Ellis. Good for her. Ellis’ book about narcissistic serial killer and Wall Street go-getter Patrick Bateman leans into the story’s misogyny, becoming a product of the very toxic male energy it’s meant to be satirizing. Harron, instead, shoves the gratuitous violence to the margins and brings a sharp, critical eye to Bateman, refusing to be seduced by the capitalist monster played with precision by Christian Bale.
Compare what Harron and Bale do here with dorm-room classic Fight Club, where toxic male energy is epitomized in Brad Pitt’s allure. There was a version of American Psycho in the works starring Pitt, with David Cronenberg directing. Thankfully we got this version instead, with Harron dissecting Bateman’s vanity, violence, and the way he lashes out like so many men when he doesn’t feel dominant or in control.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Michael Snow called his three-hour experimental feature — where a camera rolls, spins, and tumbles from a mountaintop — a “landscape film.” As in, it’s like a landscape painting you’d hang on a wall, but filmed. La région centrale is a feat of engineering: Pierre Abeloos built a remote-controlled robotic arm holding a 16mm camera, which Snow dropped in a desolate space by helicopter. The camera records for days, moving in every direction, speed, and manner possible so that a severe landscape is captured entirely by machine. Most humans would find the experience alienating; the game few have called it a window into a new way of seeing.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The first feature film produced by the National Film Board of Canada was also a foundational work for Quebec cinema and the documentary format. Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault, and Marcel Carrière direct a folksy, almost ethnographic study of the isolated French-Canadian community of L’Isle-aux-Coudres, a small St. Lawrence Island. They savour the customs and language, and the astonishing beauty of light industry cutting through a harsh landscape. The filmmakers also pull a Robert J. Flaherty: film historians often cite how the Nanook of the North director coaxed his Inuk subjects into performing traditions that had long since been abandoned. In Pour la suite du monde, the locals try their hand at whale-trapping as practised by their ancestors and the Indigenous communities before them — though some of the staunchly racist ones fiercely deny that last part.
Screening: Sunday, July 30th, 2023 at 6:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Denys Arcand was inspired to make his biting satire, Jésus de Montréal, when an actor auditioning for his previous film, Le déclin de l’empire américain, arrived with a beard, explaining that he was spending evenings as the Messiah in a Passion Play while auditioning for commercials and porn during the day. That disparity became the basis for Arcand’s cheeky and hilarious translation of the ‘greatest story ever told.’ In Jésus de Montréal, Lothaire Bluteau stars as a starving-artist type who’s both celebrated and crucified for his provocative work in pursuit of something more inspired than what ’80s consumerism demands.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Don McKellar’s vision for a very Canadian apocalypse is tidier than what we’ve seen in Mad Max or The Road. Whether intentionally or because of the limited CanCon budget, there’s less destruction on the streets, fewer marauders threatening harm, and only a single overturned vehicle. Last Night, which stars McKellar and Sandra Oh, is about Torontonians craving connection in their final hours. McKellar crafts a portrait of the city as it can only be revealed when a doomsday gets everyone’s guard down. Plus, it casts David Cronenberg as a gas company employee, giving the people of Toronto one last comforting phone call before the end.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Atom Egoyan’s seductive and probing psychological drama, about mysterious people intersecting at a dreamy and opulent gentlemen’s club, was his most accessible — and thus widely celebrated — movie at the time. The 1994 film came after Calendar’s rigorous and academia-friendly formalism. So it’s not a surprise that critics like Roger Ebert enthusiastically embraced Exotica’s more simple time-jumping structure, heightened aesthetics, and sensual performances from Bruce Greenwood, Mia Kirshner, and Elias Koteas. The actors play people stuck in an emotional purgatory, searching for connection and healing in unexpected places.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Denis Villeneuve’s thrilling and sentimental answer to Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a bridge between two phases in his career. In Arrival, the Quebecois director once again explores a parent’s anguish over their children — as he did in Incendies and Prisoners — but this time in a sci-fi movie with spaceships and philosophical provocations, a warm-up to what he does later in Blade Runner 2049 and his Dune series. Amy Adams stars as a linguist trying to build diplomacy with alien visitors. She shines in a movie that wrangles big emotions — and a meditation on grief, time, and memory — out of awe-inspiring spectacle.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
About halfway through Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, Rooney Mara’s Ona speaks an aside about butterfly migration patterns: “Did you know that the migration period of some butterflies and dragonflies is so long that it is often only the grandchildren who arrive at the intended destination?” It’s a potent and hopeful metaphor, taken directly from Miriam Toews’ original novel, about the legwork being done during this vigorous debate among Mennonite women. They’re gathered in a hayloft deciding how to respond to the men perpetrating repeated sexual assaults in their community while staring down a long journey toward healing.
During the heavy discussion, Ona beautifully delivers that line — and then Polley cuts to Jessie Buckley’s Mariche as she lets loose a magnificent, unimpressed eye roll. Polley is a confident enough storyteller to know that such undercutting humour and lightness doesn’t detract from her gutting film’s resonant takes on justice, forgiveness, and empowerment. She understands that, instead, it’s those little joyful moments that help make Women Talking a journey worth taking.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Xavier Dolan re-ups the story he told in his shrieky calling card, J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), which he wrote at 17 and filmed at 19. Armed with five years of additional experience and a bigger budget, Dolan’s Mommy became a widely and wildly heralded showcase for his roguish cinematic aesthetic, the abrasive edits and whirling camerawork landing him somewhere between Martin Scorsese and Harmony Korine. Anne Dorval and Antoine Olivier Pilon play the mother-son duo riding an emotional rollercoaster, their moments together alternating between deeply affectionate and exhaustively resentful, in Dolan’s unsettling take on mental health and the sacrifice parents make to love a difficult child.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
In his Globe and Mail review, iconic film critic Jay Scott described The Fly as a metaphor for its own creation. The movie is about a scientist (Jeff Goldblum, sexy as hell) whose DNA mingles with a fly’s. But instead of becoming a superhero, he’s turned into something monstrous and compelling. According to Scott, that’s a bit like indie Canadian director David Cronenberg splicing his morbid fascinations — which we saw in everything from Shivers to Videodrome before this — into a Hollywood movie produced by 20th Century Fox. The unholy result is subversive and feverish studio entertainment, where the monster is a tragically ambitious figure who tempts our empathy and affection as much as he tests our gag reflexes.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Denis Villeneuve made a sleek and worthy sequel to Ridley Scott’s steampunk sci-fi noir that perhaps even the OG director could not have pulled off. Instead of just leaning into fan service — the raison d’être for most franchise sequels — 2049 engages with Philip K. Dick’s ideas about androids experiencing an existential crisis. Fellow Canuck Ryan Gosling stars as K, a successor to Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner. He’s a replicant, as they call the late-model androids with implanted memories, certain there’s something special that makes him stand apart. He’s also the perfect metaphor for Villeneuve’s sequel, which has too much soul to feel like it came from assembly-line franchise moviemaking.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Patricia Rozema mined the combative energy between a boss bitch and her secretary long before The Devil Wears Prada. Swap the Vogue vibe for Toronto’s art scene and you got I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing. The delightful Sheila McCarthy stars as a spritely woman floating through life and freefalling into her photography work, getting a peek at the cynical and crushing commercial side of art when she takes a job as the assistant to a gallery owner (Paule Baillargeon). Rozema’s feature debut, which became a bold new addition to the queer canon, was a challenge to gatekeepers in visual arts — and the movie that managed to break through and win English Canada’s first prize at Cannes.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
David Cronenberg perverts that all-American genre, the Western, in his first collaboration with Viggo Mortensen. The latter, starring opposite Maria Bello and Ed Harris, plays a kindly diner operator who causes a fissure in his small town’s idyllic existence with a surprising, heroic act of violence to protect innocent people from really bad men. When and where violence is justified becomes a moving goal post — from standing up to bullies to an emotionally charged bout of rough sex. How this movie gets from Field of Dreams to Breaking Bad is a masterclass genre exercise that leaves you breathless, unnerved, and in need of a bath.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
Directed by: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn
Two Indigenous women in Vancouver whose lived experiences feel worlds apart share a brief but loaded moment together — one that’s based on reality. Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, who co-writes and co-directs alongside Kathleen Hepburn, adapts an encounter she had with a young pregnant woman experiencing domestic abuse. Tailfeathers plays Áila, a version of herself, opposite Violet Nelson’s Rosie, the survivor who’s ambivalent about escaping her situation and seeking support from shelters. Intergenerational trauma and Canada’s history of removing Indigenous children from their families both hover over her decision in this deeply empathetic and non-judgmental film — shot by Norm Li on 16mm to appear as one swift movement that urgently flies by but lingers forever.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
Directed by: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Kathleen Hepburn
A Married Couple opens with Billy and Antoinette closing the front door to their home. They just had guests over, and now they can let their guard down, be themselves, have a regular marital squabble, retreat to their bedrooms, and get undressed — a camera crew following them, invited to see what everyone else doesn’t. The opening announces what’s in store in Allan King’s intimate and explosive Direct Cinema classic, which follows this couple on the verge of a breakdown as they love and fight passionately, and at one point violently. There’s a convincing and compelling rawness here, as well as performative behaviour that blurs the line between documentary and fiction. This couple’s intimate mess made public went on to inspire the phenomenal PBS series An American Family and lay the foundation for reality TV as we know it.
Screening: Monday, July 17th, 2023 at 6:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Few have ever directed a sequence as elegantly thrilling as James Cameron during The Terminator’s neon-lit standoff at TechNoir nightclub. That’s when Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, taking cover in the club, first comes face to face with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg and Michael Biehn’s resistance soldier, Kyle Reese. Both have been sent back in time from the future — one to kill her before she can spawn humanity’s saviour, the other to protect her — but Sarah can’t tell who the threat is until he puts a red dot on her head. That moment is a distillation of everything that made the Terminator franchise so appealing, from the intense cat-and-mouse buildup to the way present and future collapse in TechNoir’s forward-looking aesthetic. As far as standalone set pieces go, not even James Cameron himself could top this one.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Before he passed last year, Mi’kmaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby said that his movies represent the “rez Indian” — the one holding up a middle finger to whatever other kind of “Indian” you want them to be. Rhymes for Young Ghouls comes out swinging with that attitude. Barnaby’s monstrously entertaining and resonant debut feature gave Reservation Dogs star Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs her breakout role as a 15-year-old hustling to stay out of a nearby residential school. The film weaves that horrifying history into a witchy brew that’s part ghost story, part heist movie, and part badass coming-of-age tale. Of course, I say that cautiously — just guessing the “coming-of-age” label is another thing Barnaby would raise a middle finger to.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Clement Virgo and producer Damon D’Oliveira have described Brother as a full-circle moment, bringing them back to terrain covered in Rude, their feature debut from 1995. Once again, they are telling a story about Toronto’s over-policed Black boys. Brother, an adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel, just happens to be set around the same time, when the kids were rocking British Knights and bumping Eric B. & Rakim records. Virgo shapes the coming-of-age story into a sensual and moving love letter to the resilient communities in Scarborough’s immigrant hubs, and the enduring power of Black love. It’s Canada’s Moonlight.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
So much of the portent scene-setting and thick, atmospheric dread that would become Denis Villeneuve’s signature in Hollywood fare is here in his recreation of the Montreal Massacre. Polytechnique, Villeneuve’s only film outside of Incendies that’s based on real events, is austere without being insensitive. Like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Polytechnique imagines what the mass shooting’s perpetrator did in the hours before he arrived at school armed with a rifle and the intention to make his misogyny ring out loud. It’s a tough watch. Karine Vanasse brings grace to her role as a survivor who was already enduring casual misogyny before coming face to face with a monster and carrying that trauma for the rest of her life.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Fiddler on the Roof producers were surprised when Norman Jewison outed himself as a “goy.” Jewison has been mistaken for being Jewish his entire life — and directing a joyously Jewish answer to The Sound of Music didn’t help clear the confusion. His faithful and affectionate adaptation of the Broadway musical is about a warm and humble milkman, Tevye (Topol), who tends to be as comically confused by his faith and stringent traditions as he is dutiful to them. That duty is tested by his devotion to his daughters, whose modern ways push the Orthodox Jewish family beyond their comfort zones. See it for the “Sunrise, Sunset” number, a beautiful and hypnotic montage of candlelit faces celebrating their community with a foreboding sense of what’s to come.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Don Shebib makes folk music from the everyday scrappy rhythms of 1960s Toronto life in Goin’ Down the Road. His working-class drama stars Doug McGrath and Paul Bradley as hopeful young men from the Maritimes trying to hack it in the 6ix (almost half a century before Drake called it that). They feel discarded at work and on the dating scene, the constant rejection fuelling their toxic and often misogynistic behaviour in a film that nevertheless stays empathetic to their plight. Shebib (the father of Drake’s producer Noah “40” Shebib) made his feature debut with just $87,000, shooting on 16mm and relying on his documentary experience to build fiction with real people and places. The result is a humble film about humble people that transcended its limitations and announced the arrival of English Canada’s cinema.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The effusive praise for Claude Jutra’s monumental work has deflated in recent years following revelations that the once-celebrated chronicler of life in Quebec sexually abused minors. That no doubt influenced how Mon oncle Antoine — Jutra’s bracingly honest, moving, and uneasy coming-of-age drama, which has regularly ranked the best Canadian film of all time — ended up down here at #38. Maybe that’s because, in retrospect, Mon oncle Antoine could be seen to be telling on itself. Jacques Gagnon stars as a teenage boy in a depressed Quebec mining town circa the 1940s, grappling with sex and death while, fittingly, becoming disillusioned with the adults in his life.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Philippe Falardeau makes good old-fashioned comforting comedies (C’est pas moi, je le jure!) and dramas (The Good Lie) that aren’t embarrassed about being sentimental. His movies avoid feeling clichéd because they come with such tenderness and soul, and his Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar is arguably his masterpiece. Algerian comic Mohamed Fellag plays the titular supply teacher, an immigrant with a tragic past who helps young children heal from a recent loss. The emotions are heavy, but Falardeau has a gentle touch in this drama about both literally and figuratively arriving at a new place.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Rude is Toronto’s answer to “New Jack Cinema,” the early-to-mid-’90s wave that gave us post-Rodney King Black film classics like Boyz’ n the Hood and Set It Off. Clement Virgo’s sexy and groovy debut, which premiered at Cannes, is about the intersecting lives in the Regent Park neighbourhood he grew up in, where various characters struggle with crime, poverty, parenting, racism, and internalized homophobia. Virgo packed all those narratives into the first Canadian film made by an all-Black team, as if he wouldn’t have another shot at telling those stories again. (That was a wise call, given how few Black stories have been told on this scale since.)
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Late filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée’s passionate and divisive Café de Flore takes the kind of big swings that feel deeply personal. The film is a whirlwind ode to the space that love occupies in our lives — and the limits to that love.
Told through dual narratives that span continents and generations, Vanessa Paradis stars as a mother fawning over her son, who lives with Down syndrome, in 1960s Paris. Meanwhile, Hélène Florent plays a modern woman unable to heal after her ex-husband finds a younger lover. The only thing that seems to connect these narratives is the emotional mess. And Vallée makes that mess into music.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Denis Villeneuve elevates this cartel thriller’s descent into hell, bringing legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins (with whom he also collaborated on Prisoners and Blade Runner 2049) along for the ride. Emily Blunt stars as a federal agent lured deep into the war on drugs by a government contractor (Josh Brolin) and an assassin who keeps his cards close to his chest (Benecio del Toro). She ends up wading through mutilated corpses without a moral compass. Sicario is the finest work to come from a Taylor Sheridan script because Villeneuve suffocates the Hell or High Water and Wind River writer’s thin and grotesque material with a hypnotic visual style and atmospheric dread.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The striking and meditative collaborations between director Jennifer Baichwal, producer Nicholas de Pencier, and photographer Edward Burtynsky — which also include Watermark and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch — began with 2006’s Manufactured Landscapes. Burtynsky looks at the way we ravage the environment — heaps of trash, fumes of toxic gas — from just the right angle to make it aesthetically beautiful. Landscapes follows Burtynsky into those environments worthy of Mad Max, becoming a companion piece to his images as it pulls back and pans to the side to consider what goes into those perfect compositions. As an audience, we’re not just passive observers of the film — and the world on fire — but active contributors.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
David Cronenberg’s Russian mob thriller is an outlier in the body horror maestro’s canon — or at least the deceptively straightforward genre movie seems that way at first. Starring Cronenberg muse Viggo Mortensen and written by Dirty Pretty Things scribe Steven Knight, Eastern Promises is a story about identity and mobility, played out among immigrants operating in London’s underworld without access to papers or visas. What they have instead are markings on their bodies: gang tattoos that tell their whole story and give them access to other kinds of spaces. Those bodies become a canvas for Cronenberg — for his gruesome theatrics but also his incisive observations.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Rémy Girard leads the ensemble playing casually racist academics who gather at a lakeside cottage in Denys Arcand’s snappy, sneering, and reactionary comedy. They talk endlessly and wittily about their sexcapades, at least the ones that don’t involve their spouses (and on occasion involve students). The most noble among them is a sex worker (Geneviève Rioux), whose transactional first meeting with Pierre Curzi’s professor is the most romantic interaction in the movie. Le déclin de l’empire américain was the first Canadian film nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar — and its sequel, Les invasions barbares, would become the first to actually win the prize nearly two decades later.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Sarah Polley’s follow-up to Away from Her is yet another melancholic look at the people who slip away and the love that stays to torment. Michelle Williams stars as Margot, a 20-something who’s as uncomfortable in her own skin as she is unsettled in her marriage to Seth Rogen’s Lou. As Margot dances around the prospect of having an affair with Luke Kirby’s Daniel, the thirst trap next door, Polley nestles into the character’s perpetual state of indecision and longing while showing her knack for feeling out the grooves between people. She crafts something tender and non-judgmental, filled with rich, warm colours and perpetual golden-hour light that creeps even into indoor spaces, as though the sun is always ready to set on these hopeless romances.
Watch online: Stream now on CBC Gem »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Francis Mankiewicz’s bleak look at life in rural Quebec is a regular on TIFF’s once-a-decade Top 10 Canadian Films of All Time list. Les bons débarras stars Charlotte Laurier as Manon, a precocious, hard-bitten child who’s obsessively starved for the attention of her single mother (Marie Tifo) and bitter at having to look after her alcoholic, intellectually disabled uncle (Germain Houde). Mankiewicz’s tough movie about a family fighting to self-sustain — released perhaps uncoincidentally alongside the 1980 Quebec referendum — finds visual poetry in despair while hanging on Laurier’s daring performance. The actor holds our empathy and our hand while taking the story to a dark place.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
Tracey Deer’s intimate look at the Oka Crisis is drawn from her own experience as an adolescent, when she witnessed firsthand the intense 78-day standoff between Kanien’kéhaka protesters and the Canadian military over burial grounds that the Quebec government had sized up for a golf course expansion. Deer’s feature debut, which won the Best Canadian Film prize at the Toronto Film Critics Association Awards, channels the earnest and sentimental vibes from coming-of-age movies of that era — like Stand by Me and My Girl — to tell a moving story about becoming self-aware during a turbulent period, where identity is shaped by both raging hormones and infuriating injustice.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
The original Alien is a chilling horror movie — a haunted house in space. The follow-up is a 50-calibre war blockbuster with more monsters, more firepower, and two queens: Sigourney Weaver and the slick black Xenomorph spawning an alien army. James Cameron puts his own stamp on the franchise, orchestrating military mayhem like a conductor overseeing a symphony while turning Weaver’s Ripley into the female counterpart to the Rambo he wrote in First Blood Part II. But Cameron also stays true to the original; the jump scares and Chestburster scenes are as terrifying as ever. He may not have been “the king of the world” yet, as he declared when winning the Best Director Oscar for Titanic — but with Aliens, Cameron established himself as the king of the sequel.
Screening: Saturday, July 15th, 2023 at 9:00pm — Paradise Theatre, Toronto. Find out more »
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
When Les invasions barbares won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Denys Arcand stepped up to the mic, following his life/business partner Denise Robert. “My time is up, as usual,” he said — a fitting acknowledgement of not just the orchestra eager to play him off, but the curtain call movie that got him to the podium.
Les invasions barbares is a sharp, comical, and self-aware victory lap for both the filmmaker and the smug, wealthy liberals from his classic Le déclin de l’empire américain. Reprising his role as the womanizing professor, Rémy Girard’s character enjoys a privileged sendoff on his deathbed, not suffering Canada’s crumbling healthcare system or the bitterness from a long line of betrayed family and friends. It’s a cynical film that Arcand, as mischievous as ever, makes sentimental.
Radheyan Simonpillai is a writer, film critic at CTV’s Your Morning, and former editor of Now Magazine. He writes the CBC Arts column Rising Stars.
